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The Hour and the Man, by Harriet Martineau.

The following is taken with acknowledgements from Chambers Dictionary of
Biography, about the subject of this book.

Pierre Dominique Toussaint l'Ouverture (1746 1803). Haitian black
revolutionary leader (the surname derives from his bravery in once
making a breach in the ranks of the enemy). Born of African slave
parents in Haiti, he was freed in 1777. In 1791 he joined the black
insurgents, and in 1797 was made commander in chief in the island by the
French Convention. He drove out British and Spaniards, restored order
and prosperity, and about 1800 began to aim at independence. Napoleon
proclaimed the re establishment of slavery, but Toussaint declined to
obey. He was eventually overpowered and taken prisoner, and died in a
prison in France.

Harriet Martineau wrote this book in 1839, during which year she also
wrote "Deerbrook", and published an analysis of her tour of America,
from which she had returned in 1836.

THE HOUR AND THE MAN, BY HARRIET MARTINEAU.

CHAPTER ONE.

WAITING SUPPER.

The nights of August are in Saint Domingo the hottest of the year. The
winds then cease to befriend the panting inhabitants; and while the
thermometer stands at 90 degrees, there is no steady breeze, as during
the preceding months of summer. Light puffs of wind now and then fan
the brow of the negro, and relieve for an instant the oppression of the
European settler; but they are gone as soon as come, and seem only to
have left the heat more intolerable than before.

Of these sultry evenings, one of the sultriest was the 22nd of August,
1791. This was one of five days appointed for rejoicings in the town of
Cap Francais festivities among the French and Creole inhabitants, who
were as ready to rejoice on appointed occasions as the dulness of
colonial life renders natural, but who would have been yet more lively
than they were if the date of their festival had been in January or May.
There was no choice as to the date, however. They were governed in
regard to their celebrations by what happened at Paris; and never had
the proceedings of the mother country been so important to the colony as
now.

During the preceding year, the white proprietors of Saint Domingo, who
had hailed with loud voices the revolutionary doctrines before which
royalty had begun to succumb in France, were astonished to find their
cries of Liberty and Equality adopted by some who had no business with
such ideas and words. The mulatto proprietors and merchants of the
island innocently understood the words according to their commonly
received meaning, and expected an equal share with the whites in the
representation of the colony, in the distribution of its offices, and in
the civil rights of its inhabitants generally. These rights having been
denied by the whites to the freeborn mulattoes, with every possible
manifestation of contempt and dislike, an effort had been made to wring
from the whites by force what they would not grant to reason; and an
ill principled and ill managed revolt had taken place, in the preceding
October, headed by Vincent Oge and his brother, sons of the proprietress
of a coffee plantation, a few miles from Cap Francais. These young men
were executed, under circumstances of great barbarity. Their sufferings
were as seed sown in the warm bosoms of their companions and adherents,
to spring up, in due season, in a harvest of vigorous revenge. The
whites suspected this; and were as anxious as their dusky neighbours to
obtain the friendship and sanction of the revolutionary government at
home. That government was fluctuating in its principles and in its
counsels; it favoured now one party, and now the other; and on the
arrival of its messengers at the ports of the colony, there ensued
sometimes the loud boastings of the whites, and sometimes quiet, knowing
smiles and whispered congratulations among the depressed section of the
inhabitants... Continue reading book >>